Village Voice's Scores

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For 11,162 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 40% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 56% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 Hooligan Sparrow
Lowest review score: 0 Followers
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,708 out of 11162
  2. Mixed: 4,553 out of 11162
  3. Negative: 1,901 out of 11162
11162 movie reviews
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  1. Foxtrot
    Maoz is as good at youthful languor as he is at the process of grief. This middle section of the film abounds with insights and moments of surprising desert beauty.
  2. Werewolf
    Its story may be thin, its characters not particularly original, but McKenzie’s use of cinematic language is savvy and novel, finding complexity where others might find only emptiness.
  3. The Young Karl Marx
    There’s something dazzling in the audacity of applying the most conventional and conservative techniques to the portrayal of radical thinkers and thoughts. That frisson keeps the movie interesting without quite jolting it to life.
  4. Survivors Guide to Prison
    Thankfully, Cooke crams in so much persuasively appalling information — especially during a tangential aside on mentally ill patients’ high death rates — that it’s easy to forgive him for seemingly trying to push all viewers’ proverbial buttons at once.
  5. November
    Above all else, November, shot in gorgeous black-and-white by Mart Taniel, is a smorgasbord of deliciously grotesque imagery.
  6. El Mar La Mar
    Nothing here is hurried, but it does fascinate.
  7. The Cured
    Even though The Cured doesn’t quite excel at being both terrifying and thought-provoking, at least it gave Juno the opportunity to become a horror hero.
  8. Are We Not Cats
    Robin uses well-timed jolts and gross-out moments to awaken his solitary characters from their stupor, to shock them into acknowledging that their existence isn’t confined to the soul’s protective shell.
  9. Where Is Kyra?
    The way Dosunmu shoots her, she feels somehow both fragile and unchanging: It wouldn’t take much to turn Kyra herself into a blur, to erase her from the screen completely; but the broader sorrow that she represents will never go away. Where is Kyra? She’s in the midst of disappearing, but she’s also everywhere.
  10. Annihilation
    It’s often inspired in its cutting and composition, and Garland (Ex Machina) has crafted sequences of strange splendor, including a too-short cosmic light show.
  11. Game Night
    Mark Perez has written one of the tightest comedy scripts to make it to be the big screen in ages. Game Night, directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, wastes not a single second of dialogue, gives killer lines to every member of its all-star ensemble, delivers genuinely tense action sequences, and even goes for broke with style.
  12. Double Lover
    It’s a buffet of psychosexual delicacies, borrowed and otherwise, all staged with hot-blooded, straight-faced vigor.
  13. Nostalgia
    Keener, as always, is excellent, a shrewd actor adept at revealing what her characters might not realize they’re revealing. Eventually, she must plumb the depths of grief, and the effect is something like watching a member of your actual family collapse and then pull herself together and keep pressing on.
  14. The Boy Downstairs
    The writer-director’s first feature is warmly affectionate and maddeningly vague, with half-formed characters, limp plotting, and performances of captivating delicacy, especially from Zosia Mamet as a novelist guided by uncertainty.
  15. The Party
    Potter isn’t what you’d call subtle, but she also knows not to overstay her welcome, and this pithy comedy is a masterclass in all that a filmmaker can squeeze from the most basic theatrical concept: Put a bunch of characters with opposing motivations in a room and see what happens.
  16. Early Man
    Aardman Animations (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit, and Shaun the Sheep) generally invests a great deal of care and precision into its storytelling, but this picture is somehow both simple and nonsensical. Early Man is the convoluted, caveman-populated skewering of FIFA that nobody asked for.
  17. Black Panther
    Written by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, Black Panther brings grounded history — in Black History Month, no less — to a fantastical story, carefully considering the world in which the characters reside.
  18. Fifty Shades Freed
    Those seeking out some titillating times would be better satisfied by Googling “feminist porn” and clicking randomly. But if you relish a mindless soap operatic story that leans into the silliness of the genre, Fifty Shades Freed might do the trick.
  19. Monster Family
    Nothing matters in this movie; stuff just happens.
  20. The Ritual
    The characters wander in baffling circles, but the story soldiers dutifully from beat to beat, scare to scare. It has this going for it — when it comes to offing its characters, The Ritual proves more pitiless than you might expect for a film that has this tony a look.
  21. Permission
    This earnest, deadly serious character study has few moments of levity, mostly provided by an arch Gina Gershon, still as intoxicating and seductive as she was in Bound.
  22. Entanglement
    Ben’s carefully plotted healing diminishes the complexity of mental illness, and gives James’s sweet vision a bitter aftertaste. Filiatrault uses too-neat bookending in the place of dramatic resolution, so that the story of a man hanging on by a thread is nicely tied up in a bow.
  23. The Student
    For most of its running time, The Student is immensely compelling, a terrifying ride between hothouse realism and dreamy metaphor. If by the end it feels unresolved, perhaps that’s because the nightmare is far from over.
  24. The Female Brain
    Despite its strong cast (including Sofia Vergara, Cecily Strong, and James Marsden), The Female Brain has trouble making its characters more than one-dimensional.
  25. Becks
    With Becks, directors Elizabeth Rohrbaugh and Daniel Powell have crafted an understated musical that really works, thanks to Alyssa Robbins’s heartfelt music and standout performances from the cast.
  26. Golden Exits
    The more microscopic and incidental the movie gets — as in this candlelit conversation — the grander its cumulative force becomes.
  27. The Peacemaker
    James Demo’s The Peacemaker is an intense, intimate portrait of a visionary capable of sophisticated analysis, abrupt anger, self-deprecating wit, and profound insights — all while existing at considerable remove from his fellow man.
  28. Basmati Blues
    Watching it is something like watching a play’s first full dress rehearsal or a gangly baby deer’s initial efforts to stand, where it’s the effort that’s more engaging than the achievement itself.
  29. Peter Rabbit
    While the film does insist on its own irreverence a bit too much at the outset...it offers plenty of lively fun once it settles down, and wisely keeps the pandering to a minimum.
  30. Lies We Tell
    As much as director–co-writer Mitu Misra wants to show the oppression and repression that still have a stranglehold on Muslim communities in Britain, he does what a lot of first-time filmmakers do their first time out — he overplays his hand.
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